Tag: quentin collins

Episode 646: Morbid games children play

The ghost of Quentin Collins has lured children Amy Jennings and David Collins to the room in the long deserted west wing of the great house of Collinwood where his skeleton is hidden. For the first time, Quentin appears. Later, a woman in a white dress will also materialize.

Quentin. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

An old gramophone starts playing a sickly waltz, and David snaps into an odd mental state. He is slow to respond when Amy calls him by name, and tells her she knows that the waltz is his favorite piece of music. She does not know this, and is puzzled to hear it, since he hadn’t heard the waltz until the night before. Soon it becomes apparent that David is coming to be possessed by Quentin. He tells Amy that they have things they must do, including a conversation with “Roger.” Roger is David’s father; this is the first time we have heard him refer to him by name, and it makes it clear to regular viewers that David is not himself. Later, they are wearing clothes of the same period as those Quentin and the woman in the white dress wore, and they decide to address each other as “Quentin” and “Beth.”

Longtime viewers will also recognize the motif of a piece of music as a device with the power to overwrite a character’s personality. In #155, David’s mother, undead fire witch Laura, gave him a music box, apparently as part of her plan to prepare him to follow her to a fiery doom.

Another music box became much more famous a little later. In the summer and fall of 1967, David’s distant cousin Barnabas was a vampire, and he was determined to re-create his lost love, the gracious Josette. His plan involved forcing a young woman to listen to Josette’s music box incessantly. Barnabas hoped that someone who spent enough time listening to the box would forget her old habits and memories and turn into Josette. The music box did seem to have some measure of the power Barnabas had in mind. First Maggie, The Nicest Girl in Town, then Vicki, David’s well-meaning governess, did spend substantial amounts of time listening to the music box with a vacant look on her face. Episode #303 ended with Vicki’s boyfriend Burke listening to the music box and staring off into space; Mrs Acilius wondered if that meant Burke was going to think he was Josette. Burke wouldn’t have looked so good in the dress that comes with the part, but who knows, maybe he and Barnabas would have been happy together.

David and Amy carry a chest out the front door of the great house. Roger and his sister, matriarch Liz, see them do this and ask what is in the chest. David says that it is full of his toys, and that he and Amy want to play with them outdoors. Roger points out that David has never taken a chest full of toys outdoors before, and asks what has led him to do so now. David tells him it is a military secret. Amy explains that one of David’s toy soldiers is broken and they are going to bury him with full military honors. Amused by this idea, Roger holds the front door open and salutes the children as they carry the chest past. In fact, the chest holds, not a toy soldier, but Quentin’s skeleton. It is that which Amy and David bury.

At night, Roger is about to go to sleep when a knock comes on his bedroom door. It is Amy, telling him she heard from sounds from the downstairs that made her suspect someone might be trying to break into the house. Roger takes this concern seriously enough that he retrieves a pistol from his nightstand and carries it as he goes to investigate.

David ties a wire across the second stair from the top of the case from the bedrooms to the foyer, opens the front door, then hides. Roger enters. He is alarmed to see that the front door is open. He stumbles on the trap David has set. He lies unconscious and bleeding at the foot of the stairs. Amy and David enter, see his condition, and nod at each other gravely.

This is the second time David has tried to kill Roger. The first time, in #15, he had sabotaged the brakes on Roger’s car. As he watched the car pull away, he called to his mother. Laura was not physically present, and would not be for another 22 weeks, but when those who watch the show from the beginning learn of her supernatural character they will ask if she influenced David to patricide. Today there is no doubt that David and Amy are doing the bidding of the ghosts, and so we wonder again if David was under Laura’s power when he took the bleeder valve from the wheel cylinder of Roger’s car.

I don’t know how much of a spoiler it is to tell someone reading a Dark Shadows blog that in the spring of 1969 Quentin would become a major breakout star, rivaling Barnabas’ popularity. Quentin would be such a big part of the show’s appeal that Dan Ross would give the last 16 of the 32 original Dark Shadows novels he wrote under his wife Marilyn’s name titles beginning with the words “Barnabas, Quentin, and the.” They were:

  • Barnabas, Quentin, and the Mummy’s Curse, April 1970
  • Barnabas, Quentin, and the Avenging Ghost, May 1970
  • Barnabas, Quentin, and the Nightmare Assassin, June 1970
  • Barnabas, Quentin, and the Crystal Coffin, July 1970
  • Barnabas, Quentin, and the Witch’s Curse, August 1970
  • Barnabas, Quentin, and the Haunted Cave, September 1970
  • Barnabas, Quentin, and the Frightened Bride, October 1970
  • Barnabas, Quentin, and the Scorpio Curse, November 1970
  • Barnabas, Quentin, and the Serpent, December 1970
  • Barnabas, Quentin, and the Magic Potion, January 1971
  • Barnabas, Quentin, and the Body Snatchers, February 1971
  • Barnabas, Quentin, and Dr Jekyll’s Son, April 1971
  • Barnabas, Quentin, and the Grave Robbers, June 1971
  • Barnabas, Quentin, and the Sea Ghost, August 1971
  • Barnabas, Quentin, and the Mad Magician, October 1971
  • Barnabas, Quentin, and the Hidden Tomb, December 1971
  • Barnabas, Quentin, and the Vampire Beauty, March 1972

My first choice is always to title these entries after lines of dialogue from the episodes, and “morbid games children play” was so perfect that I couldn’t pass it up. But Barnabas, Quentin, and the Bleeder Valve was also very tempting, and I do suspect I will use at least a few Barnabas, Quentin, and the titles in the next two and a half years.

Episode 645: We’ll go downstairs and be ourselves again

The ghost of the mysterious Quentin Collins has trapped children David Collins and Amy Jennings in a storeroom in the long-deserted west wing of the great house of Collinwood. Unable to open the door to the corridor, David and Amy have found another room hidden behind a panel in the storeroom. A room inside another room is often referred to as a “closet,” and this is the perfect soap opera closet- there is literally a skeleton in it.

On Dark Shadows, a fashion-conscious skeleton is never seen without a wig. This one is no exception. It is seated in a chair that swivels towards the children, revealing its face. This swivel reminds us of one of the most famous reveals of a bewigged skeleton in cinema, that of Norman Bates’ mother in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.

Amy and David conclude that the skeleton in the closet must be Quentin’s. The skeleton sits beside an antique gramophone that plays a sickly old waltz over and over; Amy wonders how it started playing. David has been living in the house for two and a half years, so his experience with ghosts is already very extensive, and the gramophone is the least of his concerns.

The adults in the great house have noticed David and Amy’s absence and have gone looking for them. Matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard calls at the other residence on the estate, the home of her distant cousin Barnabas Collins. She tells Barnabas that she wonders if they may have slipped in while he was sleeping. Barnabas tells Liz that he locked all the doors before going to bed, to which she responds “Barnabas, a locked door never kept David Collins out.” In 1967, Barnabas was a vampire and David kept endangering himself by sneaking into his house. In those days, David’s father Roger once made a similar remark. Barnabas isn’t a vampire anymore, but everyone other than Dark Shadows‘ hardcore fans will always think of him as one. David’s inability to get out of the room where Quentin kept him and Amy would suggest that he too has changed, and is now at a loss before locked doors. But for Liz, her nephew will always be a master burglar.

Barnabas searches his house and does not find the children. He and Liz leave for the great house. Hiding nearby, the children see them go and sneak in. As per Quentin’s orders, they go upstairs and take a wooden cradle. Later, we will see them put the cradle in the room with the skeleton and interact with Quentin’s ghost there. Their activities in the room don’t make any sense to the audience; they clearly are not meant to. They come after Amy and David have agreed to “play the game,” using a phrase we hear for the first time today. Those familiar with the mysterious atmosphere of ghost stories can assume it will be some time before we will get enough information even to guess what sort of game it is.

For longtime viewers, the highlight of today’s episode comes when Amy meets Barnabas and gives him a hug. Amy has dominated the show since her first appearance in #632; Barnabas has been its undisputed star since he joined the cast in #211. It turns out that the two of them became friends when they were both patients at Windcliff, a mental hospital a hundred miles north of town.

Amy hugs Barnabas while Liz and David look on.

The director of Windcliff is Julia Hoffman, MD. For almost a year and a half, Julia has been a permanent houseguest at Collinwood; as 1968 has gone on, she has become Barnabas’ inseparable friend. She hugged Barnabas for the first time in #635, to his evident discomfort. But as we saw when he interacted with the ghost of his little sister Sarah in #364 and again when we saw him with the living Sarah in the extended flashback to the 1790s that ran from November 1967 to March 1968, Barnabas gets along well with little girls, so it isn’t such a surprise that he returns Amy’s embrace.

In #629, Liz told Julia that Barnabas was miserable at Windcliff. If Barnabas were still a vampire, it would be easy to imagine his evil overwhelming the scientific rationality at the heart of a psychiatric facility, as it has long since overwhelmed Julia’s professional ethics. But his curse is in abeyance now. They’ve had to work to keep us thinking that he is exotic and uncanny and dangerous; one look at him in a group therapy session would undo all that work so abruptly that we would never stop laughing. Of course we never see him as a patient there. It was daring of them even to include Liz’ line, inviting us to imagine him in such a mundane setting.

In a comment on Danny Horn’s great Dark Shadows Every Day, Stephen E. Robinson wonders about the image Amy conjures up when she says that she and Barnabas spent time together as patients at Windcliff:

There’s an implication that Barnabas and Amy hung out at Windcliff, because apparently exposing small children, in shock over the deaths of family members, to middle-aged mental patients is part of the healing process. The Barnabas/Amy scene makes me laugh at loud because it’s as if the writers think Windcliff is a vacation resort and Barnabas and Amy met by the pool.

Stephen E. Robinson, comment left 11 May 2015 at 6:59 AM Pacific time, on Danny Horn, “Episode 645: Spirited Away,” 10 May 2015, Dark Shadows Every Day.

Stephen is being generous- Barnabas was in the hospital because he had himself been the victim of a vampire, and Amy was there because her brother Tom had died. She did not know, but Julia did, that Tom had also come back as a vampire, and it was Barnabas who destroyed him, first by driving a stake through his heart, later by forcing him into the sunlight. I’m no psychiatrist, but with that history of closely related but non-discussable traumas I wouldn’t think the two of them ought to spend much time together.

But of course none of that matters. Barnabas and Julia are the show’s principal protagonists, and they ran out of story two weeks ago. Ever since Amy took over, we’ve been waiting to see how she will connect with them. Now that we know she is Barnabas’ substitute sister and Julia’s sometime patient, they are ready to rejoin the action.

Episode 644: Well that was a waste of time

There is some reason to believe that writer Ron Sproat was disaffected from the rest of the production staff at this time. Today’s script is so unbelievably bad that it is tempting to think he wrote it as an act of protest.

Children Amy and David have gone looking for the ghost of Quentin Collins and are now trapped in a room in the long deserted west wing of the great house of Collinwood. David’s father Roger, his aunt Liz, and his cousin Carolyn are moving about the house in a conga line trying to find them.

Quentin’s ghost is keeping the children locked up; the ghost of someone named Magda is trying to lead the adults to rescue them. At one point the adults watch a mirror while letters appear on it spelling out “Jamison,” the name of Liz and Roger’s father. This is plainly a supernatural manifestation, but it advances neither Magda’s goal nor Quentin’s. Perhaps Jamison’s ghost can’t rest with all the racket Quentin and Magda are making, and he just wants to say hello.

Hi, kids, it’s grandpa! Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

In the locked room, David bangs on a wall, finds it is hollow, and speculates about what is on the other side. Amy protests “We can’t go through a wall!” In response, he again bangs on the wall, again finds it hollow, again speculates about what’s on the other side, and Amy again protests “We can’t go through a wall!” Later in the episode, they start this scene a third time, but they stop before Amy has another chance to say “We can’t go through a wall!” It’s just as well she does stop short of saying this a third time. By the end of the episode, they’ve found a crowbar, which enables them to pry the paneling open and go through the wall quite easily.

Meanwhile, the adults have progressed to the drawing room, where they argue about whether to search the west wing. They troop upstairs and find the door to that part of the house locked. This leads them to conclude that David and Amy can’t have gone in there, and the parade goes back to the drawing room. There, they again argue about whether to search the west wing. They again troop upstairs, this time unlocking the door and conducting the search. After they fail to find the children, they return to the drawing room again, where Roger speaks for all of us when he says “Well, that was a waste of time.”

When the adults were shuffling around huddled in their little clump, I found it hard not to look at Liz’ face and see Joan Bennett thinking that she used to be a big movie star and now she’s reduced to this stage business that would have embarrassed the Three Stooges. This week’s episodes were directed by a mysterious figure billed as “Penberry Jones”; whoever Jones was, I don’t think s/he was to blame for the weird little parade the adult characters keep making through the house. The script calls for the actors to talk with each other constantly while walking together through narrow, awkward spaces such as stairways, darkened corridors, and a cluttered store-room, and so it would have taken more time than they had to choreograph a more fluid set of movements.

David and Amy hear a waltz. It has a creaky sound to it, as though it were being played on an old gramophone. This is introduced as a special effect. Unfortunately, Dark Shadows introduces special effects by ramping up the background music, so when the children first talk about the waltz we can barely hear it. After a commercial break, the background music calms down and the waltz is more audible. We will hear it a great many times over the next several months, so often that it will be ironic to think that there was a time when we wanted to hear it but could not. I suppose Penberry Jones probably did have the discretion to tone down the accompaniment, so that would be one strike against him or her.

Longtime viewers will notice a small deviation from continuity when David tells Amy that ghosts come out only at night. In the first year of the show, David often saw the ghost of the gracious Josette in the Old House of Collinwood during the day, and from June to November 1967 he and the ghost of nine year old Sarah played together in the sunlight several times.

Episode 641: Your time is now

In #2, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins saw governess Victoria Winters standing at the edge of a high cliff overlooking the ocean. She didn’t know he was there until he startled her by asking her if she was planning to jump. As the weeks go on, Vicki will learn of other women who have leapt to their deaths from that spot, including a story that over the years two governesses were among them and that legend says a third will someday follow suit. The cliff is the face of Widows’ Hill, named after women whose husbands never returned home from the sea; several times during storms an eerie note sounds in the wind, a note known as “The Widows’ Wail,” which the locals believe to be the ghosts of the Widows announcing that a tragic death will soon take place.

Vicki stands at the edge of the cliff again at the end of this installment while the Widows’ Wail sounds. She is distraught that she has herself become a widow and is dwelling on the idea that she can be reunited with her husband in death.

Though occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes told her earlier in the episode that “Your time is now!,” Vicki’s time as a lively part of the show in fact ran out in March 1967, with the resolution of the story about her effort to befriend her charge, Roger’s strange and troubled young son David. Actress Alexandra Moltke Isles finally gave up on the character and left Dark Shadows after #627. Her successor in the role, Betsy Durkin, has essentially nothing to work with. We do not share her grief for the husband she is mourning; he was one of Dark Shadows‘ most repellent characters, and it is such a relief that he is away that we sympathize only too much with everyone who tells her to stop bringing him up. Nor do we have any other reason to care about her, since she is relevant to no ongoing plotlines. Even longtime viewers who remember the foreshadowing of Vicki’s possible death by a jump off the cliff will not react strongly to the sight of her there, since Miss Durkin is not Mrs Isles and does not bring her screen iconography to the reprise of the theme.

This phase of the show actually belongs to a character introduced in #632, eleven year old Amy Jennings. When Amy meets Stokes today she announces that she likes him because he is funny; he replies that he is pleased to find that “My appeal extends to all ages now.” Indeed it does; in its first year, Dark Shadows was very much aimed at adults, some of whom remembered Joan Bennett as one of the great movie stars of the 1930s and 1940s and were impressed by her presence in the cast as matriarch Liz, some of whom appreciated it as a specimen of slow-paced, highly atmospheric Gothic romance, and some of whom were fascinated by the story of Vicki and David and its theme of a grownup trying to make a difference in the life of a troubled child. But by the time Stokes arrived in #464, Dark Shadows had become a kids’ show. As Thayer David plays him, Stokes is amusing enough that anyone can like him, but the absolute seriousness with which he regularly expounds the most preposterous mumbo-jumbo is designed to make him a favorite of the very young.

Amy likes Stokes. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Amy’s friendship with David develops in scenes that kids will find engaging, as they go exploring the big haunted house of Collinwood and find their way into spooky adventures. She also takes the lead in her relationships with adults more consistently than David ever did. While in the first year and a half of the show David often knew things the adults didn’t know, that was usually because he accepted the facts they refused to see. No matter what he said or did, he couldn’t move them from their habits of denial and evasion. But Amy has sources of information that the grownups around her don’t have. So today she has a vision of her brother Chris in some kind of terrible trouble. When she tells Vicki and Liz about her vision, Liz tries to telephone Chris and is deeply disturbed when he doesn’t answer. As my wife, Mrs Acilius, pointed out, it is after one o’clock in the morning, so you wouldn’t expect her to attach great importance to his failure to pick up the phone. That she does suggests that she is taking Amy seriously.

Returning viewers know that Amy’s vision is correct. Chris is a werewolf, and he just killed a barmaid. That Amy not only has a paranormal means of knowing how Chris is doing, but that she is also able to get through to the adults and influence their actions, suggests that she will have a major impact on the werewolf story as long as it continues. Indeed, she already has- the werewolf was about to eat Liz the other day, but backed off when he saw Amy nearby.

Amy is central to the other storyline that is beginning at this point. That is “The Haunting of Collinwood,” in which the ghost of Liz and Roger’s’ great-uncle Quentin Collins is going to be creating difficulties for everyone. Amy and David went into the long-deserted west wing of the house and retrieved an antique telephone from a room there. Though its cord is cut, Amy can sometimes hear Quentin’s voice through its receiver. When she is alone and worried about Chris, she picks the telephone up and asks for Quentin. She is disappointed he does not answer. None of the adults knows about Quentin’s ghost or the telephone. Not even David has heard more than Quentin’s breathing through the receiver. Again, Amy is uniquely positioned to understand and affect the action.

According to the closing credits, this week’s five episodes were directed by “Penberry Jones.” The name “Penberry Jones” is unknown to Google aside from these credits, and it sounds like a joke of some sort. Though the fansites all mention the improbability of Jones’ name and the likelihood that it is a pseudonym, none that I could find offers any clue as to who might have been behind that pseudonym. From the early 1970s until the quarantines of Covid-19 in 2020, Dark Shadows fans would organize festivals a couple of times every year at which panels of people who had been involved in making the show took questions from the audience. If any of those audiences asked who Penberry Jones was, either they did not get an answer or that answer was not recorded.

The name “Penberry” may remind longtime viewers of Dark Shadows of episode #83, which is about Roger burying a pen. Roger was a major villain then, and his part gave actor Louis Edmonds an opportunity to show what he could do. Roger has long since been demoted to occasional comic relief; one might imagine that Edmonds wanted to take a turn in the director’s chair, and that he chose his whimsical pseudonym as a nod to his character’s origins. Appealing as that idea may be, it does not seem at all likely. So many of the panel discussions among cast members abounded in fond stories about Edmonds that surely someone would have mentioned it if he had directed five episodes.

Indeed, most of the longer-lived members of the cast participated in so many of those panels that they all had moments when they had to grope more or less desperately for something fresh to say. If anyone whose name fans would recognize and who worked closely with the cast were “Penberry Jones,” it’s hard to imagine that one or another of them wouldn’t have brought it up in one of those moments.

Whoever it was must have been known to executive producer Dan Curtis and line producer Bob Costello, and probably quite well known to them. The Directors Guild of America does allow its members to change the names under which they are credited, as for example John Walter Sullivan was allowed to direct several episodes of Dark Shadows as “Jack Sullivan” and several more as “Sean Dhu Sullivan.” But it does not allow them simply to use pseudonyms at will. It wasn’t until 1969 that directors working in features could be billed as “Alan Smithee,” and then they had to prove that they did not really have control of the final product before they were allowed to substitute that name for their own. The first television production credited to “Alan Smithee” didn’t appear until 1970. So it is unlikely that “Penberry Jones” directed any screen productions under any other name. Curtis and Costello probably wouldn’t have chosen a first-time director with no imminent prospects of other screen work unless it were someone they already knew and trusted.

If “Penberry Jones” didn’t cover anyone the cast knew well or a director who worked under another name, but was someone who was close to Dan Curtis or Bob Costello, it should be possible to compile a short list of suspects. I’m not so deeply immersed in the behind-the-scenes lore that I can compile that list myself, but maybe you are. If so, I’d like to hear from you in the comments!

The director’s name isn’t the only puzzle in the closing credits. Every previous episode of Dark Shadows ended with the credits playing in front of a stationary shot of one or another set. It was always one shot per closing credits sequence. This time they start with a stationary shot of Vicki’s room, then cut to a stationary shot of the foyer. It’s hard to see what the point of that transition is. Perhaps we could ask “Penberry Jones,” if we had any idea who that was.

Episode 640: Stay for another séance

Eleven year old Amy Jennings and her big brother Chris joined the show recently, and they are the stars today. Amy has discovered the ghost of Quentin Collins, who haunts a room in the long deserted west wing of the great house of Collinwood. Strange and troubled boy David Collins is rather miffed that Quentin prefers Amy’s company to his- after all, “Quentin Collins is my ancestor,” not Amy’s. They hold a séance in an attempt to bring Quentin to them. David has only participated in one séance, back in #186, when he went into a trance and gave voice to the late David Radcliffe, a boy who died (by fire!) in 1867. So he hasn’t had a chance to catch on that séances on Dark Shadows require a minimum of three people- the first to begin the ceremony and bark orders at everyone else, the second to go into the trance and act as medium, and the third to grow alarmed, try to wake the medium from the trance, and be sternly rebuked by the first. Since David and Amy have no third person, they have no chance of contacting Quentin.

Instead, a shadowy figure appears in the doorway. She is well-meaning governess Vicki, or a rough approximation thereof. David Collins’ scenes with Vicki had been the highlight of the first year of Dark Shadows, not because of the writing or the direction but entirely due to the rapport between actors David Henesy and Alexandra Moltke Isles. A few weeks ago Mrs Isles left the show, and Vicki was recast. Her brief appearance is Mr Henesy’s first scene with the new actress, Betsy Durkin. They can’t recreate his chemistry with Mrs Isles, and Vicki ran out of story long ago. As a result, the scene sounds a discordant note for longtime viewers, reminding us that Miss Durkin, whatever her talents, is here nothing more than a fake Shemp taking up screen time.

Unknown to the other characters, Chris is a werewolf. Chris accepts an offer from the Collins family to host Amy at Collinwood while he deals with his mysterious problems; in gratitude, he takes heiress Carolyn for a drink at the Blue Whale tavern. While there, he sees a pentagram on the barmaid’s face and hurriedly excuses himself. Later, he transforms into his lupine shape and returns to the barroom, not through the door this time but through the window. He kills the barmaid.

The werewolf drops in to the bar. Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The barmaid appears only in this episode; she doesn’t even get a name. But we see her face in closeup often enough that she feels like a person. Even more importantly, she is wearing the same wig that Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, wore in her first four episodes (#1, #3, #7, and #12.) Since Maggie was also a server, working the counter at the diner in the Collinsport Inn, this wig tells longtime viewers that the werewolf’s victim could just as easily have been Maggie, one of everyone’s favorite characters.

Don Briscoe played Chris in his human phase, Alex Stevens as the werewolf. Stevens was credited not as an actor, but as “Stunt Coordinator.” Yet today, his credit card appears in between Briscoe’s and that of Carol Ann Lewis, who was cast as the luckless barmaid. Some of the original audience may have caught on that Stevens was the man in the character makeup, but others who noticed the odd billing order would have chalked it up as another of the show’s frequent imperfections.

Episode 639: I’ve never heard of a Quentin Collins

The only story that consistently worked in the first year of Dark Shadows was well-meaning governess Victoria Winters’ quest to befriend her charge, strange and troubled boy David Collins. In #191, David’s mother, blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, was trying to immolate him and herself. At the climactic moment, David ran from the flames into Vicki’s arms. When David chose Vicki and life over Laura and death, their story was concluded, and Dark Shadows 1.0 came to an end.

Vampire Barnabas Collins would first appear on Dark Shadows in #211 and quickly become its main source of interest. The show never made up its mind how Vicki would relate to Barnabas’ story. The obvious move would have been to follow Bram Stoker’s Dracula and make Vicki the vampire’s first victim, rising from the dead like Lucy Westenra as “The Bloofer Lady,” a friend to children in life who in her undead afterlife feeds on the blood of children. In that case, Vicki would be destroyed as she was about to kill David. But Vicki had been an effective protagonist throughout the Laura story, which was itself in large part an adaptation of Dracula, and if as seemed likely the show was going to be cancelled with #265 they would have wanted Vicki to stake Barnabas at the end of that episode. So she was spared his bite, and instead he turned his fell gaze upon Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town.

With Vicki walled off from the vampire story, David’s contact with it was initially limited to the inconvenience he could make for Barnabas by sneaking into his house during the day. When Barnabas was keeping Maggie in his basement, a new character was introduced who would meet David and relate to him in a way that would bring him to the center of Barnabas’ concerns. This was the ghost of Barnabas’ little sister Sarah, a girl about David’s age.

David Henesy had been the only child actor on Dark Shadows until Sharon Smyth joined the cast as Sarah in #255. Miss Smyth had very little of the training and experience Mr Henesy brought to the show, but playing a ghost she didn’t really need them. Our main reaction to Sarah is puzzlement, puzzlement as to what she wants, what she can do, and whether she knows anything at all about herself and the world she finds herself in. Miss Smyth was just as puzzled as the audience about all of these questions, and that works to her advantage. In Sarah’s scenes with David Collins, Sharon Smyth’s feelings about David Henesy- a precocious crush mixed with fear of his propensity for playing rather nasty practical jokes on her- added a touch of urgency without erasing any of the character’s mystery. At the same time, Mr Henesy’s acting skills made it possible for us to believe that David Collins had gone a tremendously long time without catching on that Sarah was a ghost. Once David Collins finally did figure it out, David Henesy made the most both of scenes where he coolly presented skeptical adults with irrefutable evidence of Sarah’s true nature and of scenes where he became overwrought at his inability to convince them of the truth.

Sarah’s ghost hasn’t appeared since #364. A couple of weeks ago Alexandra Moltke Isles left the show and the part of Vicki was recast; Mr Henesy hasn’t shared a scene with the new actress, but he had barely shared a scene with Mrs Isles for a year. Throughout 1968, his appearances on the show have been few and far between. Today, for example, he makes his first appearance since #609, which was in turn only his second appearance since #541. That changes when he meets a new co-star who will change the trajectory of his character and of the show.

Amy Jennings is played by Denise Nickerson, whose preparation was fully equal to Mr Henesy’s. Her style was quite different from his- while he, like Mrs Isles, tended to play his characters from the inside out, figuring out what is in their minds and then using the dialogue and action to project that understanding, she tended to start with the action and find the character in the middle of it. Today she shows up on the grounds of the estate of Collinwood just as David’s aunt, matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, comes face to face with a werewolf. The werewolf was about to attack Liz, but he runs off at the sight of Amy. Liz takes her unlikely rescuer home with her to the great house on the estate.

There, Amy meets permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman, MD. Julia is the nominal head of Windcliff, a sanitarium from which Amy recently escaped. Liz describes the encounter with the werewolf, and Amy explains that she is looking for her brother Chris. Returning viewers know that Chris is the werewolf, but none of the characters knows this yet. The adults are mystified by Chris’ wandering ways and his refusal to take responsibility for his little sister, while Amy is convinced that he is ready to give that up and settle with her in the village of Collinsport.

Julia wants to ship Amy back to Windcliff at once, but Liz talks her into letting Amy stay the night. David strolls in; he meets Amy, and Liz sends the two of them to get housekeeper Mrs Johnson.

We see David and Amy looking out the window of a guest room during a storm. David is disappointed to hear that Amy won’t be staying through the next day, and talks about what they will do the next time she visits. He asks if the thunder and lightning frightens her, she says no, “It can’t hurt you.” To this he replies, “Sure can! Lightning can strike you dead.” After a brief pause, he adds “Well, if you’re not afraid, I guess you don’t need me.” That sequence of lines is so funny the humor must have been intentional.

Amy asks David to stay. They sit on the floor in front of the fireplace in her room, and at her suggestion they decide to explore the long-deserted west wing of the house. They go straight to a room in which they find an antique telephone. They decide to play a game in which they pretend to talk to the ghosts of the people who used to live in the house using the telephone. Amy actually gets through to one of them. David thinks she’s kidding him, and takes the phone. To his amazement, he hears breathing on the other end, even though the telephone’s line is cut.

David gets a really long distance call. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

David only heard the breathing, no words. Amy tells him that the voice identified itself as that of Quentin Collins. David, whose avid interest in Collins family history made it logical that he, in #205, would be the first character to mention the name “Barnabas Collins,” says he has never heard of Quentin.

Later, they return to Amy’s room and find Quentin’s picture in a family album. Liz comes in, and when David asks her about Quentin she tells him that he was her great-uncle, that he left for Europe when he was young, and that he died in Paris. Regular viewers will remember that when Barnabas became a vampire, the Collinses put about the story that he had gone to London, and when he came back in 1967 he introduced himself to Liz as a cousin from England. Thus the show suggests that Quentin may be its next attempt to match Barnabas’ breakout success.

Amy has taken the telephone to her room, and at the end of the episode she talks to Quentin again. He beckons her to return to the room in the west wing, and she goes. If Quentin is indeed going to succeed Barnabas as Dark Shadows‘ great supernatural menace, evidently it is Amy who is in danger of becoming his first victim.

In #636, occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes remarked that he had never heard of a ghost communicating by telephone. During this period, the show was going through a lot of last minute rewrites; the Dark Shadows wiki reports on several flimsies and drafts that were cast aside and replaced with new scripts. So I can imagine that Stokes’ line may have inspired the idea of using the telephone to introduce Quentin, though perhaps it is likelier that they already had the prop and Stokes’ line was a private joke among the writers.

My usual themes: Continuity

In 281 of the posts that follow, I link to comments I made on Danny Horn’s blog, “Dark Shadows Every Day.”

Not all of these comments were absolutely unique. A number of times I argued that the show was not so discontinuous as people were making it out to be. To be sure, the creative process is very close to the surface, so that viewers have to do a lot of re-writing in their heads to make sense of what they’re watching. Sometimes the writers just lost track of the story and contradicted themselves from one episode to the next, and other times they changed their minds abruptly. But there were other times when alleged contradictions can be reconciled without having to invent anything drastic.

For example, Danny and many of his regular commenters from time to time mock the depiction of Dr Julia Hoffman as sometimes a blood specialist, sometimes a psychiatrist. I think that’s a pretty easy one to resolve. In this comment, I added some fanfic of my own to sell the idea that she started as a hematologist and retained an interest in that field after switching to psychiatry:

The story I made up for myself is that Julia started out as a blood specialist but switched to psychiatry. She was interested in rare diseases, the rarer the better. She found that in hematology, there’s so much money to be made from developing treatments for the most widespread disorders that a researcher with an emphasis in the exotic is constantly fighting an uphill battle for funding and recognition.* Even those colleagues who had an abstract appreciation of the importance of studying rare disorders had to work within a system where all the institutions push them towards the biggest projects possible.

Psychiatry, on the other hand, always had room for the unusual.** In fact, Julia discovered that high-strung rich people would pay a great deal of money to be told that whatever happens to be bothering them at the moment is not the same kind of problem that one of their servants might have, but is a mental aberration hitherto unattested in the annals of psychiatry.*** So she switched to that field and quickly made enough money to open her own, hugely profitable, mental hospital. But she never stopped working in rare blood diseases, and the experiments she was able to finance by flattering the vanity of her wealthier patients earned her such a reputation in a male-dominated field that even her old acquaintance Dave Woodard would commit sexist slips of the tongue and say of “Hoffman” that “he” is “the top man in the field” of rare blood diseases.

Lucrative as Windcliff was, Julia’s true love was never money, or even science per se, but the exotic. When she found herself as the best friend/ frequent accomplice/ bossy big sister of an honest-to-wickedness vampire, surrounded by ghosts and witches and werewolves and Frankensteins and time travelers and interdimensional anomalies and who knows what else, there was never any question of her going back to the office.

*I have no reason to believe this was true in the real world in the middle decades of the twentieth century, or that it is true today. It’s simply part of the fictional world in which I see Julia.
**(Same note)
***(Same note)

In this comment, I devised a much more modest bit of fanfic to answer a simpler question. Quentin has a girlfriend named Tessie, and at some point in the night he had, in his werewolf form, attacked her in the woods. Why was she in the woods? Danny and his commenters had proposed various awkward scenarios to answer this question, but I suggest she just followed Quentin after she saw him in town looking for booze.

In the “1995” segment, Mrs Johnson and Carolyn talk about how Mrs Johnson brushed Carolyn’s hair for her when she was a little girl. Some say this was a continuity error, because Mrs Johnson didn’t come to work at Collinwood until episode 81. Before that, she’d been housekeeper to Collins family retainer Bill Malloy. However, I say that she still could have brushed little Carolyn’s hair while working for Malloy:

I have a theory that could explain Mrs Johnson brushing Carolyn’s hair when she was little.

In the early episodes, Carolyn talks about having gone to school in town. How did she get there?

She can’t have walked; it was miles away, much of it along a winding road with several blind curves. Her mother never left the grounds during those years, she couldn’t have driven her. Roger was living in Augusta with Laura. The only servant was Matthew. Matthew and Carolyn don’t seem at all close; it doesn’t seem likely that he drove her to school every morning. If a school bus came up the hill to Collinwood day after day, the kids who rode it couldn’t have maintained the attitude Carolyn describes, whispering behind her back about her living with the witch in the haunted house. Sooner or later they’d have started talking to her face to face about it.

Carolyn also talks about Bill Malloy being more like a father to her than any other man, and the two of them do have a cozy relationship. Carolyn is also very quick to fall in with Mrs Johnson when Burke pitches the idea of her joining the household staff at Collinwood. So I think we have to conclude that Bill Malloy and his housekeeper were in charge of getting Carolyn to school in the mornings. Malloy was on the fishing boats, so that would require an early start to the day. There were probably many days when little Carolyn was still in her pajamas when she got to the Malloy house. On those days, Mrs Johnson brushed her hair while the water came to a boil for breakfast.

Several times I explained my theory about how the “Meet Gerard” segment (episodes 1061-1198, including “1995,” “The Re-Haunting of Collinwood,” and “1840”) fits together. This iteration also suggests ways to resolve a couple of puzzles about Angelique:

For me, a lot can be explained by the smile of satisfaction Gerard gives when he sees Julia and Barnabas take the staircase from 1995 to 1970. The dark power he represents called them to 1995 from Parallel 1970, and is now sending them back in time, first to 1970, then to 1840 to make it possible for the future they see in 1995 to exist.

This is analogous to what the Leviathans did at the end of 1897. First Quentin’s ghost, then Barnabas and Julia’s I Ching trips, had created a rift in the order of things that made it possible for the Leviathans to erupt from the underworld into the human world, and to send Barnabas to 1969 as their agent. So too have the journeys Barnabas and Julia took into Parallel Time torn open the fabric of time and space, and made it possible for Judah Zachery to bring a Frankenstein maker back to his time.

Attributing to Zachery the same power to exploit disruptions in time to shuttle people between past and future and thereby to rewrite his own history that the Leviathans had shown, we also have a way to resolve the Angelique/ Miranda paradox. Perhaps Angelique really was relatively new to witchcraft in 1795. Perhaps also, in her early naive attempts, she stumbled into the same kind of trouble Barnabas stumbled into with his time-travel. That’s what Zachery had in mind when he shouted at her during his trial that she ought to tell the truth, that she had come to him of her own accord- it was only because she had already worked in the black arts that he could call her to him, from the days after she first left Collinwood in 1796 to a nearby town 104 years before. And perhaps, with the first beheading of Zachery, his spell broke returning her to a time shortly after the “Burn Witch Burn!” moment in the tower room.

Come to think of it, that might also put sense into Angelique’s remark that she is “consigned to this century forever.” There were a few days after Zachery calls her to 1692 and before she returns from 1692, and until Barnabas and Ben torched her, she was sentenced to relive those few days over and over again, Bill Murray-style.

That’s a comment on Danny’s post for episode 1140. Just four episodes later, the show will kick away the explanation I offer for Angelique‘s various incarnations in the main continuity, but leave open the rest of it.

The logic that counts the most in the show isn’t so much the kind of sequential reasoning that I’ve done in these posts as it is the associational logic of a dream. An image or situation or word reminds a dreamer of something, and suddenly the dreamer is in the middle of that something. You dream about polishing your Ford with Turtle Wax, and the next thing you know Polish turtles are whacking away at a shallow spot in a river. You tell a story about rich, selfish people who obsessively keep secrets and set a dreary tone for their town, and the next thing you know your main character is a vampire. I left an unreasonably long comment where I natter on about the concept of dream logic.